Inspiration
Quotivated was inspired by the simple idea that the right words at the right time can change your entire perspective. I wanted to capture that moment of clarity and make it into a daily ritual. At the same time, I saw a gap with existing motivation and quote apps. In my opinion, they feel uninspired and content discovery is difficult. My goal was to build something more beautiful and intentional. An app that is a delightful experience, not just a random feed.
What it does
Quotivated delivers daily motivational quotes, each quote is paired with unique artwork that matches the mood of the words, to make discovering new quotes more joyful. Users can explore editorial content and curated collections to help guide them to interesting content. Each quote is designed as a standalone piece of art, and users can save these to their own private library for future reflection.
How we built it
The app was built in SwiftUI, with Firestore to power the backend database and user authentication, and RevenueCat of course, powering the paywall pro subscription. I leveraged my 10+ years of career in iOS app development, with the aid of AI coding tools to accelerate the development. I built custom caching logic to minimise network calls and ensure smooth offline performance. For the artwork I used an AI design tool called Visual Electric, and I manually curated pairings of imagery, typography, and color palettes.
Challenges I ran into
- Generating unique, high-quality background art for every quote was time-intensive and continues to be a bottleneck in getting more content published into the app.
- Designing typography that worked across short and long quotes, while staying legible and elegant, took several iterations.
- As a solo indie developer, I had to balance design ambition with time constraints to get a MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) to market.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- Delivering a lightweight, performant, polished app as a solo indie project, from concept to design to code.
- Creating an experience where every single quote feels unique, with its own artwork, fonts, and palette.
- Building not just a product, but a mission-driven app that donates a portion of proceeds to a mental health charity.
What I learned
- A good product comes from iteration. I tweaked many details continuously until the feeling was right, it is such a balancing act that it can sometimes be difficult to know when is the right time to release.
- AI is a hugely powerful creative partner, but it cannot replace human curation which is essential for judging emotional resonance.
- A good product is not always enough to build a business, it's not a case of "build it and they will come". The development process is just one part of a much bigger process.
- It's amazing what can be achieved as a solo developer. By leveraging the right tools and with focus, it's possible to compete with larger teams.
What's next for Quotivated: Inspiring Quotes
The roadmap for Quotivated is looking quite extensive:
- Support for widgets is a natural extension to make the quotes more prominent and discoverable.
- Adding Apple Intelligence support to interpret a user's input and to use this to surface relevant quotes based on the user's mood and emotion.
- I am long-term bullish on AR/VR. I think Quotivated could be really interesting on the Apple Vision Pro now that visionOS 26 supports widgets. Imagine pinning your saved quotes in an AR widget to your office wall!
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